Cortical representations of visually specific information in working memory

视觉工作记忆是一种核心的认知功能，它允许人们主动地保持和操纵关于不再出现的刺激的信息。在美国国家科学基金会的资助下，范德比尔特大学的Frank Tong博士正在研究人类视觉系统如何在数秒的延迟时间内主动保持有关视觉特征和物体的信息。这个项目正在评估这样一个假设，即视觉特定的内容是由于自上而下反馈到大脑的早期视觉区域以及大脑的更高层次的对象选择区域而保持在工作记忆中的。问题是，早期的视觉大脑区域能在多大程度上保留关于主动记忆物体的视觉精确信息。汤博士正在开发先进的方法来解码人类大脑活动的模式，目的是阅读关于一个人在工作记忆中保持的项目的信息。实验正在研究多个视觉区域如何表征简单视觉模式和复杂物体的信息。额外的实验是为了测试这些工作记忆表征是否对视觉干扰具有鲁棒性，以及它们的内容是否可以根据参与者的目标进行动态操纵和修改。这些结果旨在为视觉工作记忆的神经基础提供新的见解，它对干扰的鲁棒性，以及它对记住的视觉内容的灵活操纵能力。视觉工作记忆系统在即时感知和更高层次的认知过程之间提供了一个重要的联系，并且对于心理意象、基于视觉的学习、视觉空间规划以及保持一个人环境中物体的最新表征都很重要。了解视觉工作记忆的神经基础对于推进人类大脑功能的知识非常重要，并且对于开发更好的方法来改善教育环境中的学习也很重要。对视觉工作记忆的研究也是开发更好的方法来诊断视觉工作记忆障碍的先决条件，它最终可能导致治疗干预。该项目的方法学进展也与脑机接口的研究高度相关，它们构成了从人脑活动模式中解码特定心理内容的能力的进步。

Visual working memory is a core cognitive function that allows people to actively maintain and manipulate information about stimuli that are no longer in view. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Frank Tong of Vanderbilt University is investigating how the human visual system actively maintains information about visual features and objects over delay periods of many seconds. This project is evaluating the hypothesis that visually specific content is maintained in working memory as a result of top-down feedback to early visual areas of the brain as well as to higher-level object-selective areas of the brain. The question is to what extent early visual brain areas can retain visually precise information about an actively remembered object. Dr. Tong is developing advanced methods to decode patterns of human brain activity for the purposes of reading out information about what item a person is maintaining in working memory. Experiments are investigating how multiple visual areas represent information about simple visual patterns and complex objects. Additional experiments are for testing whether these working memory representations are robust to visual interference, and whether their contents can be dynamically manipulated and modified based on the goals of the participant. The results are designed to provide new insights into the neural bases of visual working memory, its robustness to interference, and its capacity for flexible manipulation of remembered visual content. The visual working memory system provides an essential link between immediate perception and higher-level cognitive processes, and is important for mental imagery, vision-based learning, visuospatial planning, and the maintenance of an updated representation of the objects in one's environment. Understanding the neural bases of visual working memory is important for advancing knowledge of human brain function and is also relevant to developing better methods to improve learning in educational settings. Research on visual working memory is also a prerequisite to developing better methods to diagnose individuals with impairments in visual working memory, and it may eventually lead to treatment interventions. The methodological advances from this project are also highly relevant to research on brain-computer interface, and they constitute an advance in the ability to decode specific mental content from patterns of human brain activity.